Thursday 28 August 2014 06.25 EDT
First published on Thursday 28 August 2014 06.25 EDT

Now that the nights are drifting in and the air has become more autumnal, television can finally roll up its sleeves and start delivering the big hitters. No more documentaries about compulsive shoppers, or endless consumer shows about men from the council who seek out trace amounts of imported tobacco in corner shops.

Now is the time for the real TV shows. Shows that make you laugh. Shows that make you cry. Shows that make you laugh and cry at the same time, until you find yourself involuntarily screaming and flailing around like Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest.

I'm not joking. I wish I were. Pound for pound, BBC1's DIY SOS offers far more emotional heft than almost anything else on television. Thought it was sad when that bloke died on Downton Abbey? Overcome by the miracle of life during Call the Midwife? Well, watch the last two minutes of any episode of DIY SOS, where Nick Knowles will manage without fail to turn the act of grouting a kitchen backsplash into a heroic metaphor for the agony of modern social alienation, and you'll be in pieces. Every single time.

It wasn't always this way, of course. DIY SOS has been on the air since 1999, when it began as an insipid Changing Rooms knock-off. Lowri Turner was a co-presenter. There was a weekly viewer phone-in vote. The whole thing burbled along pointlessly, content with the fact that you were only watching because the remote was all the way over there and you had just had a big dinner. But in 2010 things changed, when DIY SOS underwent a MasterChef Goes Large transformation and became DIY SOS: The Big Build.

This marked the point where the scale of renovation became more ambitious, where the show latched on to the idea of the 'big society' and began seeking help from neighbours and local tradesmen. It was the point where the tiresome laddy banter of old gave way to something slightly more vulnerable and self-aware. The moment where households started being picked because they deserved the help, and not just because dad's a bozo who doesn't know which way up a hammer goes.

And, crucially, it marked the moment where Knowles started allowing himself a brief, climactic, Kevin McCloud-esque summary of the entire episode. This, inevitably, was where it all got insanely heartfelt. This is why, whenever DIY SOS is on, Twitter fills up with messages from people who can't understand why they're crying at a show about woodwork.

At least there won't be any surprises this series – which begins with an episode about a family forced to abandon a renovation when their baby was born with spina bifida – because Knowles' shtick has become so well-honed that it has absolutely nowhere to go. Unless a marching band coalesces around him to parp out a rousing rendition of Land of Hope and Glory, or the street he's working on lights up in an explosion of fireworks like at the end of a Bruce Springsteen concert, or he just rips the shirt off his chest and drops to his knees and screams the word 'LOVE!' into the sky over and over again, he's already hit his emotional plateau.

But people don't watch DIY SOS to be surprised. In fact, they barely even watch it at all. It's more the case that they simply strap themselves in and allow themselves to be emotionally manipulated to within an inch of their lives for an hour. DIY SOS is exhausting. It's ridiculous. But I'm glad it's back.